After spending over 50 years on and around the water, I have realized that without strong fisheries laws and effective conservation measures, the future of salt water fishing, and America's living marine resources, is dim. Yet conservation is given short shrift by national angling organizations and the angling press. I hope that this blog will incite, inform and inspire salt water fishermen to reclaim their traditional role as the leading advocates for the conservation of America's fisheries.

Sunday, August 16, 2015

A WHOLE DIFFERENT ATTITUDE

For freshwater anglers in the upper Midwest, the walleye is
probably the leading sport and food fish, which probably plays the same role
there that summer flounder does in the Mid-Atlantic. So the Mille Lacs closure was about the
equivalent of a state shutting down its summer flounder fishery around the
first week of August.

As is currently the case with summer flounder, no one is
entirely sure why the walleye declined, but the decline is a big one. Until a few years ago, the harvest quota for
the lake was 500,000 pounds, split between anglers and net fishermen belonging
to the indigenous Ojibwe people, with anglers receiving a little over 70% of
the harvest. But the population fell so
far and so fast that the 2015 quota for the lake was a mere 40,000 pounds.

That’s a lot sharper reduction in landings than the 29% cut
that the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council recommended for summer
flounder next year.

But what I find interesting is the attitudes of the
fishermen who are affected.

I was at the August Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council
meeting, and listened to fishermen, both recreational and commercial, respond
to the proposed summer flounder cuts. Just about every
speaker either challenged the science behind the reductions or, in effect,
asked that it be ignored.

On the recreational side, New Jersey attorney Ray Bogan,
representing the Recreational Fishing Alliance, said that the 29% reduction
would be

“a true management and human crisis.”

And to be fair, for some in the business, that might be
true.

Representatives of the for-hire industry were far blunter
than that, with one, Captain Jeff Gutman of the New Jersey-based party boat
Voyager, reading a letter from Capt. Ed Yates, the President of the United
Boatmen’s Association. Yates wrote that
United Boatmen “strongly reject” any harvest reduction, and went on to write
that there was

“no reason for the cuts other than to destroy the for-hire
fishing fleet,”

and made the fairly pointed claim that

“I know and you know that the numbers are bogus.”

Other recreational comments were somewhat milder, but the
bottom line is that, among those in the crowd, there wasn’t a lot of support
for harvest reductions.

The commercial sector was no happier about the pending
cuts. Long-time industry spokesmen, such
as Greg DiDimenico of the Garden State Seafood Association and Jerry Schill,
who represents commercial interests in North Carolina, spoke about economic
hardship and the loss of infrastructure that harvest reductions might cause,
and asked that steps be taken to minimize the reductions.

Individual commercial fishermen universally condemned the
science used to justify the harvest cuts, sought more “transparency” with
respect for how the data was gathered and used and asked that the full 29%
reduction not be made.

As was the case with the recreational side, there were some less
measured commercial comments, too. A
spokesman for New Jersey’s Belford Seafood Cooperative said that the fishermen
couldn’t take any additional cuts. He
addressed the Council, saying

“All you do is steal our lives”

and asked

“When are we going to be left to make a living?”

He finished up by accusing the Council, saying

“You stoled [sic] our licenses, you stoled everything”

and compared the Council and the National Marine Fisheries
Service to Bernie Madoff.

That’s very different from what happened in Minnesota.

In Minnesota, it does look like the science is flawed, with
a local paper reporting that biologists

“now believe they overestimated by a significant margin how
many fish they could take from the lake.”

if harvest quotas remain low, there is no evidence that
guides, tackle shops, boat dealers and the rest of the angling-dependent
businesses are pouring out to fight the harvest reduction. Instead, they have joined with the state to
try to figure out why the walleye population in the lake has collapsed, and to figure
out how to restore it, recognizing that there are no easy answers.

And the biggest group of commercial fishermen on the lake,
the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, have stated that they will voluntarily forego any
walleye harvest in 2016.

That’s a very different thing than we see on the coast.

Yet it seems to be a recurring theme.

Whether we’re talking about walleye or whitetails, trout or
turkeys, sportsmen in the interior of the nation, as well as the businesses
that support them, seem to generally be far less hostile to needed conservation
measures than their counterparties on the coast.

Some of the objections that you hear to salt water
management measures are extremely difficult to comprehend.

At the August Mid-Atlantic Council meeting, managers also
set 2016, 2017 and 2018 harvest limits for scup (usually referred to as “porgies”
here in New York).

Scup management is a success story. The biomass has risen to more than twice the
target level, and neither the recreational nor the commercial fishery has been
able to land its full allocation in recent years despite, in the recreational
fishery’s case, a steadily declining minimum size and increasing bag limits.

However, everyone understands that today’s bounty won’t
continue forever, and the scup population will eventually decrease to more typical
levels.

At least, everyone in fisheries management understands that
basic truth. Thus, Council staff
proposed annual catch limits that declined slightly in every year through 2018
to reflect, among other things, decreasing—but still more than healthy—recruitment
levels. Staff noted that, by 2018, the
annual catch limits might be reduced to the point that they finally do constrain
landings.

Such decrease caused a number of fishermen at the meeting,
from both the commercial and recreational sectors, to rise in indignation,
asking why a fishery that is now at twice the target level should
be subject to future reductions.

Apparently, the difference between “now” and “future” was
not something that the fishermen could comprehend…

And perhaps that is the greatest difference in attitude
between fresh and salt water anglers.

Yet in the rivers that flow into the bays where New York’s
flounder spawn, there are remnants of Long Island’s heritage strain of brook
trout. Although the population in one of
those waters, the Carmans River, appears to be holding its own, if at low
levels, the remainder are on their last legs, in at least as bad a shape as the
flounder. But when the Department of Environmental
Conservation outlawed any taking of Long Island brook trout at all, no one—not
the tackle industry, and certainly not the anglers—objected to an action that
clearly was the right thing to do.

So why the difference?

It’s hard to say, but it’s possible that inland habitats are
small enough that sportsmen can see just what is happening, and can’t avoid the
truth of a population’s decline, while in the ocean, it is all to easy to
believe—if you choose to—that the fish just went elsewhere or the data is bad.

But the reason is not important, for too many fish
populations experience far too much stress in both inland and out in the
sea. And if salt water anglers don’t
make an attitude adjustment sometime soon, they might find themselves without
much to catch, whatever the regulations might be.